The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) didn’t exactly point fingers and do any name calling, but the results of its broadband penetration study shined like red badge on the US’s broadband shortcomings. When compared to the rest of the world, Uncle Sam comes up short.
By the end of 2007, the US had slipped from 12th place in the world in terms of broadband penetration to 15th place, due mainly to consumers paying higher prices for slower speeds and poor rural access.
Despite that the US comprised nearly 70 million broadband subscribers, or about 30% of the total subscribers in the 30 countries studied, only seven countries were paying more for broadband access: Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Mexico, Iceland, Hungary, Poland and Norway.
Not exactly a who’s-who among developed nations. With 40% of Japan and 34% of Korea wired up to fiber connections, that busts the US down the ranks even further in terms of broadband speed. Twenty-six countries had faster advertised DSL speeds, putting the US just ahead of Mexico, Turkey, and Poland.
That’s good news for all the immigrants coming across the Rio Grande; they can count on slightly better Internet speeds. The fastest advertised download speed in the US was 50 Mbps, half of what is available in Finland, France, South Korea and Sweden, and dwarfed by 1Gbps available in Japan.
While we sourly remember a $200 billion good-faith payment the US government made to the telecommunications industry 12 years ago, the OECD gives recommendations for today’s government for improving available access. The recommendations are as follows:
• Governments need to promote competition and give consumers more choices. They should encourage new networks, particularly upgrades to fibre-optic lines.
• Governments providing money to fund broadband rollouts should avoid creating new monopolies. Any new infrastructure built using government funds should be open access – meaning that access to that network is provided on non-discriminatory terms to other market participants.
• Governments should discourage harmful business conduct and practices such as misleading advertising and unjustifiably long consumer lock-in periods.
Can you find which things the US forgot to do in the past 20 years?
“The fact is that the countries outperforming the United States have something we lack — a coherent national broadband policy,” said S. Derek Turner, research director of Free Press. “Policymakers who are serious about America’s economic and social well-being should focus on the open access policies that bring the benefits of broadband to all Americans.”
According to an analysis by Free Press, countries with open access policies had nearly twice the level of broadband penetration as those that did not.
